When their mission to a Boromar outpost lands them on the wrong side of the law, several of the heroes find themselves doing community service in a junkyard in the Cogs. In the junkyard, they are reunited with an old acquaintance, the goblin acolyte named Stab, and meet a local gang of orphans. A twist of fortune leads the party to a startling revelation about someone from Reckoner’s past.

Player Characters: Balkris, R. Sativus, Reckoner, Timber

I.

Reckoner was cleaning up a remote part of the junkyard to fulfill his community service. He was left by his companions after Balkris had returned early to his home and Timber vanished without a trace on the very first day. However, Reckoner was accompanied by other warforged who were scavenging among the junk heaps. Among them was a warforged named Skirmisher, who had served has a scout during the war but now walked with a limp in his right leg.

The warforged were gathering useful parts for a Cannith agent. On the last day of his community service, Reckoner followed the warforged to their rendevous point with the agent, having collected a sizable amount of scrap metal himself.

When they arrived, Reckoner was surprised to see R. Sativus, whom Skirmisher seemed to recognize. The gnome had continued her investigation into the rumors in the Cogs, and her search had led her back to the junkyard. Unbeknownst to them, Timber was watching them from the shadows of a nearby junk heap. He had followed the figure that the warforged had come to meet.

Reckoner and R. Sativus soon realized that the warforged were not meeting a House Cannith agent at all. Instead, there were two orphan children, one sitting on the other’s shoulders, wearing a House Cannith researcher’s lab coat. Yet the flimsy disguise seemed to convince these warforged who held out their bags of metal part expectantly.

Reckoner confronted the “agent” and startled the child on top. Being frightened by the sudden challenge, the child stumbled and fell out of her disguise. When the lab coat dropped to the ground, the heroes saw that it was no child underneath but a goblin. It was Stab the goblin acolyte whom Reckoner and R. Sativus met at the Clifftop Adventurers Guild two months ago!

But Stab was not as they remembered him. Part of the goblin’s scalp had been removed and covered over with a metal plate studded with crystals that was bolted and stapled in place. Stab had been lobotomized with metal parts that belonged on a warforged.

R. Sativus managed to calm the frightened child. She revealed that her name was Aana, and she was a member of a local gang of orphans calling themselves the Steel Hawks. Aana confessed that she had tricked these warforged into helping her collect items that were needed to her sick friend Maxx.

Maxx was a human girl who was being treated by someone known only as the Doctor. The Doctor had told Aana that the only way to save Maxx was by gathering together those items that were necessary. Yet the heroes found it strange that the items on Aana’s list were mostly parts used in the repair of warforged, just as iron studs and alchemist’s spark. The heroes grew curious and offered to help if Aana led them to her friend and the Doctor. Skirmisher and the other warforged, having nowhere else to go now that the Cannith agent had been unmasked, followed Reckoner to the hideout of the Steel Hawks.

On the way there, the heroes tried to speak with Stab and asked what had happened to him, but found he could not communicate except in slurred and broken words, though a light of recognition entered his glazed white eyes when they called out his name or mentioned the Traveler.

Reckoner recognized that the crystals embedded in Stab’s metallic scalp were parts also used in the creation of psiforged, those rare warforged models with unique psionic powers. Among the crystals in the metal plate, there was also a final messenger, a device used to convey the final moments of a warforged before it was destroyed. But this device seemed to have malfunctioned and had stopped recording.

Aana reported that the goblin had been found by her friends, wandering aimlessly a few weeks earlier, around the same time when Bastion – another Karrnathi warforged and Reckoner’s former comrade at arms who was also searching for their commanding officer, Raylan Givens – had left the junkyard. During their conversation, Aana had let slip that the Doctor who was helping her friend Maxx had, in fact, been referred to as “Doctor Givens.” Upon hearing this, Reckoner grew more insistent that they hasten their pace to meet this doctor of the junkyard.

II.

Later that day, after crossing the vast expanse of scrap heaps, the heroes finally arrived at a large porthole in the side of a gigantic trash mound. Reckoner recognized it to be of Karrnathi design. Soon after, Timber arrived and rejoined the others after having wandered off toward the southern edge of the junkyard. Together, they watched as Aana knocked on the porthole. Curiously, the door opened, but there was no one in the dark passage on the other side of the entrance. The party ventured within.

They were startled to discover an abandoned bunker built inside the trash mound. It had a honeycomb of passages and chambers which were burnt and hollowed out, as if someone had meant to destroy their contents. However, they found bits of bone, metal, and crystal that indicated the sinister purpose of this place: This was the research facility of a Karrnathi Mastermaker, a rare breed of artificer that combined Cannith’s warforged technology with the dark arts of necromancy.

The heroes arrived at a large hall which Reckoner recognized to be a former mausoleum where Karrnathi necromancers would typically store their legions of undead warriors. Now this hall had been turned into a makeshift camp and hideout by the urchins of the Steel Hawks.

At first, the children were wary of the heroes and their warforged companions. But the heroes convinced them that they were only there to help the Doctor and their friend Maxx. Three of the children and Aana led them to the chamber where Maxx was being cared for. R. Sativus illuminated the way with a continual flame spell.

In the deepest part of the complex, they arrived in a dark room which looked like a former medical bay. The found a young girl strapped to a makeshift gurney by strips of metal on her arms and legs. Her body was covered all over with tubes, connecting her to a massive metallic figure in the shadows. When the heroes approached, the metal figure stirred and came into the light. It was a gigantic half-assembled warforged!

Its head alone was 6 feet tall and it was connected by gears and piping to a massive metal torso. From its shoulder, there extended an enormous robotic arm terminating in a giant pincer. But the lower half of its body was incomplete. The metal monstrosity was in the process of completing its construction using the parts and pieces collected by the unsuspecting warforged scavengers and the children of the Steel Hawk gang.

But the most disturbing part of the construct was a round spherical plane of black glass. When R. Sativus’ light reflected off the glass, she saw within what looked like a human brain.

From the metal creature, there issued a mechanical voice, speaking gibberish and singing children’s songs which one might hear from the orphans of the Cogs. Through the static and garbled noise, Reckoner recognized the voice of Raylan Givens.

Reckoner spoke to the machine, asking who had done this to his beloved former commander and friend. The machine spoke only two words: “Givens…… Doctor…….”

It was clear that the machine had some memory of its former life, and knew that a terrible operation had been performed on it. The children had heard these two words and mistook them to mean that the machine was referring to itself as Doctor Givens. But in truth, the machine had taken Maxx as a hostage rather than a patient. In the absence of the alchemist’s spark needed as a power source, it was leeching away her life energy to sustain itself.

When the heroes realized this, Reckoner leapt forward and cried out.

“The man I knew as Raylan Givens would never do something so inappropriate!”

The heroes tried to rescue the girl Maxx from the clutches of the Doctor. The Doctor fought back by lashing out with its giant pincer and using strange psionic powers to cause the ceiling of the room to partially collapse. The children, thinking that the heroes were hurting Maxx rather than trying to save her, threw stones at them and defended the Doctor.

The Doctor sent out a signal to the other warforged who waited in the hall and took command of them. All of the warforged except for Skirmisher turned against the party and tried to rush inside to defend the Doctor, but Skirmisher held the doorway against their onslaught.

The odds weighed heavily against them until Stab the goblin regained a semblance of his sanity and came to the party’s aid. Maxx also began to see that the heroes were trying to rescue and revive her friend Maxx. She convinced the other children to stand back, and heroes managed to convince the warforged to stand down as well.

Yet even alone in battle, the Doctor was a force to be reckoned with. R. Sativus was dismayed when her fire magic had no effect upon the machine. Reckoner charged again and again, casting aside his shield to swing his warhammer with both hands, but he seemed almost reluctant to fight this robotic revenant of his former commander. Timber managed to cause some harm to the machine, but even his powerful kicks and blows left only hairline cracks on the hardened glass covering the brain.

The situation grew even more dire as Skirmisher charged into the fray with his rusty pipe to aid his comrade Reckoner. But the Doctor caught Skirmisher in its pincer and crushed him into the ground. With his last ounce of strength, Skirmisher passed the rusty pipe, the last weapon he would ever wield, into Reckoner’s hand before his arm fell and grew still.

Seeing their longtime comrade of the junkyard fall, the warforged scavengers recognized that their true enemy was the Doctor. They joined the heroes in surrounding the machine and pounded upon it with their metal pipes. The children, too, realized the Doctor had been harming their friend all along and threw their stones at it. Timber and Reckoner gathered their strength and fought back with renewed vigor. The machine was soon reduced to a ruined mass of gears and plates while the glass covering the brain was cracked in many places. The final blow came from R. Sativus who launched a psychic attack with her Mind Spike spell. The brain inside the machine shuddered and then exploded against the broken glass.

The battle had ended, and Maxx had been rescued. Stab summoned the power of his faith to cure the girl of her ailments. Thereafter, orphans of the Steel Hawk gang looked to the heroes with awe and respect.

But the victory was bittersweet. Reckoner had lost an old friend and a new one. Though he had only known Skirmisher a short time, the past few days shoveling scrap in the junkyard had given him a routine and a sense of purpose, if only for a brief time. Now, Skirmisher was gone. The other warforged bore Skirmisher’s broken body away from the room in a solemn procession, their metallic footsteps echoing through the halls.

Worse still, Reckoner had found Raylan Givens only to lose him a second time. In the ruined heap of metal that was once called the Doctor, Reckoner found a final messenger embedded in the metal plate near the splattered brain. Like the one found on Stab, this final messenger had malfunctioned and stopped recording some time ago. The heroes realized they could examine the contents of these devices to see what they had recorded, or repair their flight capabilities so they could fly back to their creators and lead the party to them. Now, Reckoner grew determined to find out who had turned to his beloved friend into a monster.

III.

Although he had completed his community service, Reckoner had no desire to go back to the comforts of a nobleman’s house until he had tracked down whoever had experimented on his former commander. R. Sativus also felt a desire to act as a patron for the orphan gang in the junkyard. She would move her base of operations to the lower city and take it upon herself to sponsor these wayward youths of the Steel Hawks, renaming them the Steel Rats.

Timber, however, was not eager to leave the comforts of a nobleman’s house. He decided to return to the Vadalis estate, but before he left he remembered the message that he was asked to deliver.

Earlier that day when Timber had wandered off on his own, he had arrived at the southern entrance to the junkyard. He was surprised to see Alicia Lund, the gnome codebreaker, waiting for him outside.

Alicia had come to greet the adventurers at the end of their community service. In truth, this was merely an excuse to deliver a message. A member of the Sharn Watch had visited the Vadalis estate, where Alicia was still a guest, to ask some questions. He was Inquisitive Kavill, a former watchman who had risen swiftly through the ranks of the Sharn Watch during the past two months to the rank of Chief Inquisitive of the Dreamlily Prohibition Bureau.

Kavill was looking for two individuals whom he suspected of having criminal ties: a man named Mickey Bishop and a gnome nicknamed “the Rat.” He had heard their names and their association with a noble of House Vadalis in connection to his own investigation into a dead Orien courier and a man named Cyril d’Orien.

Thanks to the rumors spread by Mickey, Cyril d’Orien came under suspicion of conspiracy, murder, and grand theft. He was taken downtown and questioned by Kavill. But much to the inquisitive’s surprise, Cyril made a full confession and claimed to have acted alone. House Orien distanced itself from Cyril and refused to acknowledge any involvement in his crimes. But shortly thereafter, Cyril vanished from his cell using a clever ruse involving a rope trick spell.

Alicia Lund had asked Timber to warn the others that if they returned to the Vadalis estate, the authorities may come to question them.

Having resolved to remain in the Cogs for a time, Reckoner and R. Sativus spent the following days exploring the remainder of the bunker complex with the help of R. Sativus’ rat. In time, they discovered a hidden cellar that had not been incinerated. Inside, they found a gruesome cache of corpses. They belonged mostly to the poor and destitute people that had dwelled in the lower city. But among the bodies, the heroes recognized Yeq the Grin, the shifter that had murdered the House Orien courier two months ago. Strange, his brain appeared to be missing.

But more importantly, they also found the body of a dragonmarked nobleman. Through discreet inquiries, they determined that the body belonged to Cyril d’Orien. However, Cyril’s remains were in an advanced state of decay. The heroes guessed that this man had been killed around two months ago, near the same time when Professor Cinderveil had vanished from Morgrave University. But how could that be when Mickey Bishop had seen Cyril only a week ago? They began to wonder what dark conspiracy they had stumbled into.